Reapplying stropping paste

[Wend]

Hi folks,

I have a leather strop, and a tub of chromium oxide stropping paste. Should I be reapplying the paste each time I use the strop, or how do I tell when it should be reapplied?

Thanks
Wend

 

[DBT85]

I just put some on occasionally.

There's probably a formula for the exact amount to use on the right phase of the moon for optimum sharpness like everything else on the subject.

Do your usual sharpening, strop it and see. The green bar I use cost me like 6 quid and will last years so it's not exactly a problem if you over use it. But it's also not like the stuff just vanishes once it's been used a few times either.

 

[thetyreman]

I reapply mine about once every week or two, basically when I start noticing that it's not quite as sharp, periodically I clean it with the edge of a thin chisel and remove the excess.

 

[Argus]

As with many things, I think that there are few hard-and-fast rules. I asked a similar question when I learned carving more formally.

The leather will only hold so much paste, before it lets go the excess and it comes away readily, stuck on the blade and then onto your work. When it does that is a function of the absorbancy of the leather, your rubbing action and how often you use it.

Overloading the strop, again, reduces its ability to hone and is wasteful on paste......

I guess that the best advice is a very little smear of paste, wiped on very occasionally; (don't forget a little smear of oil,rarely, to keep the whole lot moist). I also find that an occasional gentle roughing of the surface helps release the inevitable surface compression and lifts off the minute pieces of steel burr that gets left behind. You can do this by drawing a plane-blade backwards in one direction a couple of times before you give it to the stones to sharpen.

Hope that this helps..... good luck.

 

[woodbloke66]

I reapply mine about once every week or two, basically when I start noticing that it's not quite as sharp, periodically I clean it with the edge of a thin chisel and remove the excess.

Yep, that sounds about right but I rub a finger full of Vaseline into the leather as well as the stropping compound (green Veritas bar). Just helps to make the stropping a little smoother - Rob

 

[Wend]

Thanks all!

 

[MikeG.]

I'd be really interested to see what others think of Brasso or T Cut, which is what I use. I don't recognise the problems you are all talking about, and certainly don't need vaseline. I wipe some on say every 3rd or 4th time I use the strop, and that's it. Nothing else. It fills in any little cuts in the leather. So, does anyone else use it?

 

[Argus]

Interesting question, Mike. Here's my take on it:

I have only one use for MDF - cutting the stuff is evil.

I use a 11" square piece of 1" thick stuff, surface well oiled, which has (working from L to R), 1/3rd fine rouge paste, 1/3rd Autosol and the final third is clear, which I use as a final burnish.

Its principal use is to polish up the backs of plane blades and chisels, which I believe it does an excellent job.
I suppose that Autosol is similar to T-Cut

 

[Woody2Shoes]

I'd be really interested to see what others think of Brasso or T Cut, which is what I use. I don't recognise the problems you are all talking about, and certainly don't need vaseline. I wipe some on say every 3rd or 4th time I use the strop, and that's it. Nothing else. It fills in any little cuts in the leather. So, does anyone else use it?

I use autosol - much the same as Tcut I suspect - refreshed with a bit of 3in1 if it gets 'crispy'.

 

[NickM]

I've also used autosol on an MDF strop but haven't tried it on the leather.

 

[AJB Temple]

I use autosol on leather as well (for knives mainly). I tend to wipe the strop down after use.

 

[woodbloke66]

While we're all talking stropy , I saw a UToob clip a while back from the US where the presenter mentioned that if your last honing medium is finer that the strop medium then stropping is a counter productive process, which to me at the time seemed to make sense.

I use a 1 micron SS 3M film from Workshop Heaven to add a little final polish to the edge and from the research I managed to do, it appears to be a lot finer than the green Veritas stick stuff. However, that said it's quite difficult to work out a direct comparison between the two, so I decided to abandon stopping altogether as it didn't seem to make any difference to the finished edge - Rob

 

[Trainee neophyte]

I'd be really interested to see what others think of Brasso or T Cut, which is what I use. I don't recognise the problems you are all talking about, and certainly don't need vaseline. I wipe some on say every 3rd or 4th time I use the strop, and that's it. Nothing else. It fills in any little cuts in the leather. So, does anyone else use it?

I was using brasso on MDF but since getting some metal polish cream in a tube (German generic stuff - not sure who produced it) I got a better result. Not saying it's a good result, but noticeably better than the Brasso. (My inexperience should be taken into account).

 

[D_W]

I'd be really interested to see what others think of Brasso or T Cut, which is what I use. I don't recognise the problems you are all talking about, and certainly don't need vaseline. I wipe some on say every 3rd or 4th time I use the strop, and that's it. Nothing else. It fills in any little cuts in the leather. So, does anyone else use it?

every reasonably finely graded compound works - it can be something marketed at woodworkers, brasso, simichrome, wheel polishing compound for cars..anything that's advertised to be a final bright polish will work well.

The wax sticks work fine (as long as they're final polish, and folks who load them just need to add a drop of mineral oil when they scribble their crayons on the leather).

(not related to your post) easiest way to clean a leather strop is to scrape it with the back/top of a card scraper and then eyeball the cleaned leather for metal bits pinned in it. If there are none, move on. once every several weeks, or whenever it seems necessary (either due to caking or because you've noticed spiderwebbing on what you're sharpening due to stray junk in the strop. Scrape the junk off, it'll be a glob on the card scraper back, push the glob off into the trash).

The only thing I've ever found *not* handy in stropping was a CBN concentration that I bought over here - it was intended for a machine lapidary tool and the concentration was super low. It was cheap and listed as "high concentration", which was high concentration for its application, but not for us.

SDS for any polish you can find will always tell the abrasive that's in it. What used to be different due to inability to find super fine abrasives (crocus, etc, water of ayr for silver - matching the polish to the hardness of the metal) is almost universally now just graded alumina. I experimented with this several years ago and found just about everything has alumina in it, even if it's for polishing soft metal. I bought pigments (like iron oxide) to see how the original worked compared to the various alumina sizes and couldn't really find much practical difference. It's all just a matter of finding out what makes something work well and less about "buying the only thing that works as well as _____".

 

[El Barto]

I reapply mine about once every week or two, basically when I start noticing that it's not quite as sharp, periodically I clean it with the edge of a thin chisel and remove the excess.

Haven't heard of this before. Do you mean cleaning the strop with a chisel to get rid of previous honing compound etc?

 

[thetyreman]

I reapply mine about once every week or two, basically when I start noticing that it's not quite as sharp, periodically I clean it with the edge of a thin chisel and remove the excess.

Haven't heard of this before. Do you mean cleaning the strop with a chisel to get rid of previous honing compound etc?

yes, you just use the side of the chisel and drag it across, removes the black paste without damaging the leather.

 

[AJB Temple]

You can take this to extremes. Good friend of mine in the US is a serious knife collector. He brought me some diamond stropping solutions in various grades. He thinks they are brilliant. To be frank I can't see any difference between them at all, or between them and stuff like autosol.

I only strop seriously for my best Japanese kitchen knives. For chisels and plane blades I don't bother a lot of the time unless I am trying to do very fine work. For everyday work (like my kitchen project) it's just a time waster as the edge is good enough straight off the linisher.